Making narrower pine lining

[wqlava1]

I've got an old heritage-listed house, built in 1891 and later extended in the period of it's historical interest between 1902 and 1914 that's got all pine lining internally. There are several different widths of pine lining boards, all with a regency pattern. I have a small supply of 6" boards that will help with the horizontal ones above the picture rail, but and can easily get the 135mm boards that Bunnings sells, but it's the smaller sizes like 4, 4.5 and 5" from much earlier that are hard to get and expensive when available. I thought maybe I could cu down some modern boards from Bunnings and shape them up with appropriate router bits. Is this possible? Do I need a router table?

Thanks,
Andrew

[forrestmount]

Hi Andrew

I had this issue a while back, I actually measured one board and had a run made to this width. I the discovered all boards on the one section varied in width by a few mm. So I measured the entire gap I needed to fill and divided the number of boards to get an average.
I then cut the groove end off the boards I had and used a Tritan table saw to re-cut the groove.


A few traps

New boards are thinner than the older ones so you need to pack out the new boards or visit a demo yard.

Old boards are brittle but fit better. I prefer to use the older boards


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk Pro

[wqlava1]

Thanks UA, but the regency pattern boards have a bevel on them as well, and I was hoping to do this all in one pass or as few passes as possible. Needing a couple of hundred metres of it means I can afford to buy whatever bits and maybe a jig or a router table.

[ian]

at a couple of hundred metres, I strongly suggest you contract the job to an outfit with a shaper and power feeder.

doing it yourself would be doable, but ideally you would use a shaper and power feeder and mill your own raw stock -- then it'll be the correct thickness